Business cards typically contain information pertaining to an individual and an associated business entity. The information associated with the business cards usually includes a company name, an individual's name, title, phone number, facsimile number, mail address, e-mail address, and so forth. A business card thus records information that is needed to identify and contact the individual represented by the business card. Typically, business cards become outdated when the individual moves offices, change employers, obtain promotions, etc. As a result, inaccurate business cards remain in circulation long after being outdated. Another problem with conventional business cards is that the distribution of such cards is manual.
With the advent of the Internet, a large number of social and business networking websites have been developed and utilized extensively to connect people and business associates. Social and business networking systems connect users associated with the system to facilitate communications between users for business profile creation, job networking, service referrals, activity partners, and the like. A number of approaches have been conventionally employed to obtain social opportunities and information from such networks. Such approaches, however, do not provide an efficient mechanism for communicating personal contact information, nor the ability to quickly update and distribute updates, search for key contacts based on connections or referrals from others, rate connections, etc.
Based on the foregoing, it is believed that a need exists for an improved method and system for storing and distributing contact information over a network. A need also exists for automatically updating contact information with respect to a social and/or business network, as described in greater detail herein.